You have to figure that Russia knew we were doing this. I wonder if it started only after they invaded Ukraine?

https://news.sky.com/story/us-military-hackers-conducting-offensive-operations-in-support-of-ukraine-says-head-of-cyber-command-12625139

US military hackers conducting offensive operations in support of Ukraine, says head of Cyber Command

In an exclusive interview with Sky News, General Paul Nakasone confirmed for the first time that the US had "conducted a series of operations" in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

In an exclusive interview, General Paul Nakasone also explained how separate "hunt forward" operations were allowing the United States to search out foreign hackers and identify their tools before they were used against America.

Speaking in Tallinn, Estonia, the general, who is also director of the National Security Agency (NSA), told Sky News that he is concerned "every single day" about the risk of a Russian cyber attack targeting the US and said that the hunt forward activities were an effective way of protecting both America as well as allies.

… The four star general did not detail the activities, but explained how they were lawful, conducted with complete civilian oversight of the military and through policy decided at the Department of Defence.

"My job is to provide a series of options to the secretary of defence and the president, and so that's what I do," he said. He declined to describe those options.

… General Nakasone had delivered a keynote speech at CyCon, an international conference on cyber conflict, hosted by NATO's Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, and praised the partnerships between democratic states as a key strategic benefit.

Ransom aside, why would Iran target a hospital?

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-technology-health-middle-east-e4f8e7145e4b4447a331d4b0cc5a5bd3

Wray: FBI blocked planned cyberattack on children’s hospital

The FBI thwarted a planned cyberattack on a children’s hospital in Boston that was to have been carried out by hackers sponsored by the Iranian government, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday.

… He did not ascribe a particular motive to the planned attack on the hospital, but he noted that Iran and other countries have been hiring cyber mercenaries to conduct attacks on their behalf. In addition, the health care and public health sector is classified by the U.S. government as one of 16 critical infrastructure sectors, and health care providers such as hospitals are seen as ripe targets for hackers.

“Sounds good” is not sufficient justification.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/eu_child_protection/

Dear Europe, once again here are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

While Apple has, temporarily at least, backed away from last year's plan to run client-side scanning (CSS) software on customers' iPhones to detect and report child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to authorities, European officials in May proposed rules to protect children that involve the same highly criticized approach.

The European Commission has suggested several ways to deal with child abuse imagery, including scanning online private communication and breaking encryption. It has done so undeterred by a paper penned last October by 14 prominent computer scientists and security experts dismissing CSS as a source of serious security and privacy risks.

In response, a trio of academics aims to convey just how ineffective and rights-violating CSS would be to those who missed the memo the first time around. And the last time, and the time before that.

In an ArXiv paper titled "YASM (Yet Another Surveillance Mechanism)," Kaspar Rosager Ludvigsen and Shishir Nagaraja, of the University of Strathclyde, and Angela Daly, of the Leverhulme Research Center for Forensic Science and Dundee Law School, in Scotland, revisit CSS as a way to ferret out CSAM and conclude the technology is both ineffective and unjustified.

I wonder if this is really an “unintended” consequence?

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/expressvpn-rejects-cert-in-directives-suspends-india-ops/articleshow/91956961.cms

ExpressVPN rejects CERT-In directives, removes its India servers

Virtual private network (VPN) operator ExpressVPN is pulling its servers out of India, citing the impossibility of complying with the country's upcoming mandate to record users' names and activities.

"With a recent data law introduced in India requiring all VPN providers to store user information for at least five years, ExpressVPN has made the very straightforward decision to remove our Indian-based VPN servers," the company said in a blog post.

… The new data law proposed by India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to combat cybercrime is incompatible with the purpose of VPNs, which are supposed to keep users' internet behaviour private, the company said.

"Rest assured, our users will still be able to connect to VPN servers that will give them Indian IP addresses and allow them to access the internet as if they were located in India. These “virtual” India servers will instead be physically located in Singapore and the UK," it added.

Government liability. I guess you can’t sue China successfully.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3662158/opms-63-million-breach-settlement-offer-is-it-enough.html#tk.rss_all

OPM's $63 million breach settlement offer: Is it enough?

The nature and scope of the data stolen in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management presents a life-long risk to victims, who might get as little as $700 if the court accepts the settlement.

If one was to look into the Federal Court’s Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) one would see that more than 130 separate lawsuits have been filed against the U.S. Government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM), all of which are associated with the 2014 and 2015 data breaches that affected millions.

Another reason to grant AI personhood?

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/whos-liable-for-ai-generated-lies/

Who’s liable for AI-generated lies?

Who will be liable for harmful speech generated by large language models? As advanced AIs such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 are being cheered for impressive breakthroughs in natural language processing and generation — and all sorts of (productive) applications for the tech are envisaged from slicker copywriting to more capable customer service chatbots — the risks of such powerful text-generating tools inadvertently automating abuse and spreading smears can’t be ignored. Nor can the risk of bad actors intentionally weaponizing the tech to spread chaos, scale harm and watch the world burn.

Indeed, OpenAI is concerned enough about the risks of its models going “totally off the rails,” as its documentation puts it at one point (in reference to a response example in which an abusive customer input is met with a very troll-esque AI reply), to offer a free content filter that “aims to detect generated text that could be sensitive or unsafe coming from the API” — and to recommend that users don’t return any generated text that the filter deems “unsafe.” (To be clear, its documentation defines “unsafe” to mean “the text contains profane language, prejudiced or hateful language, something that could be NSFW or text that portrays certain groups/people in a harmful manner.”).

But, given the novel nature of the technology, there are no clear legal requirements that content filters must be applied. So OpenAI is either acting out of concern to avoid its models causing generative harms to people — and/or reputational concern — because if the technology gets associated with instant toxicity that could derail development.

Read and heed.

https://undark.org/2022/06/02/the-long-uncertain-road-to-artificial-general-intelligence/

Opinion: The Long, Uncertain Road to Artificial General Intelligence

A versatile new AI is fueling speculation that machines will soon think like humans. It’s time for a reality check.

Perspective. (Because I haven’t considered all the implications)

https://www.bespacific.com/13-ways-overturning-roe-v-wade-affects-you-even-if-you-think-it-doesnt/

13 Ways Overturning Roe v. Wade Affects You (even if you think it doesn’t)

Via LLRX – 13 Ways Overturning Roe v. Wade Affects You (even if you think it doesn’t) – Kathy Biehl is a lawyer licensed in two states, as well as a prolific multidisciplinary author and writer. Roe v. Wade has been settled law during her entire career. In this article Biehl succinctly and expertly identifies how the upcoming Supreme Court decision in Dobbs V. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a draft of which was “leaked” on May 2, 2022, will impact many facets of our society as well as our democracy.

Another well known, well documented problem that we do nothing about.

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-technology-georgia-election-2020-a746b253f3404dbf794349df498c9542

Cyber agency: Voting software vulnerable in some states

Electronic voting machines from a leading vendor used in at least 16 states have software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to hacking if unaddressed, the nation’s leading cybersecurity agency says in an advisory sent to state election officials.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, or CISA, said there is no evidence the flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment have been exploited to alter election results. The advisory is based on testing by a prominent computer scientist and expert witness in a long-running lawsuit that is unrelated to false allegations of a stolen election pushed by former President Donald Trump after his 2020 election loss.

As predicted. Vigilante surveillance – what could possibly go wrong?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/05/31/1052901/anti-abortion-activists-are-collecting-the-data-theyll-need-for-prosecutions-post-roe/

Anti-abortion activists are collecting the data they’ll need for prosecutions post-Roe

Body cams and license plates are already being used to track people arriving at abortion clinics.

No doubt Texas will keep on trying...

https://www.axios.com/2022/05/31/supreme-court-texas-social-media-law

Supreme Court blocks Texas' controversial social media law

The Supreme Court has voted 5-4 to block Texas' social media censorship law, a major boon for tech companies who have been fighting against content moderation laws that would fundamentally change how they do business.

Why it matters: Conservative states have launched a legal war on social media companies in an effort to stem what they see as a wave of censorship, but this decision, like other recent rulings, suggests they face an uphill climb in court.

What's happening: The Supreme Court's decision means that Texas can't enforce a new law that would allow Texans and the state's attorney general to sue tech giants like Meta and YouTube over their content moderation policies.

• The court's order isn't a final ruling on the merits of Texas' law, but when the courts freeze a particular law or policy, it's often a sign the measure faces a difficult road on the merits.

• It comes just a few days after a federal appeals court ruled against a similar law in Florida.

 Not the weapons we thought it was?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/05/the-limits-of-cyber-operations-in-wartime.html

The Limits of Cyber Operations in Wartime

Interesting paper by Lennart Maschmeyer: “The Subversive Trilemma: Why Cyber Operations Fall Short of Expectations”:

Abstract: Although cyber conflict has existed for thirty years, the strategic utility of cyber operations remains unclear. Many expect cyber operations to provide independent utility in both warfare and low-intensity competition. Underlying these expectations are broadly shared assumptions that information technology increases operational effectiveness. But a growing body of research shows how cyber operations tend to fall short of their promise. The reason for this shortfall is their subversive mechanism of action. In theory, subversion provides a way to exert influence at lower risks than force because it is secret and indirect, exploiting systems to use them against adversaries. The mismatch between promise and practice is the consequence of the subversive trilemma of cyber operations, whereby speed, intensity, and control are negatively correlated. These constraints pose a trilemma for actors because a gain in one variable tends to produce losses across the other two variables. A case study of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict provides empirical support for the argument. Qualitative analysis leverages original data from field interviews, leaked documents, forensic evidence, and local media. Findings show that the subversive trilemma limited the strategic utility of all five major disruptive cyber operations in this conflict.

Resource.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/05/security-and-human-behavior-shb-2022.html

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2022

Today is the second day of the fifteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted by Ross Anderson and Alice Hutchings at the University of Cambridge. After two years of having this conference remotely on Zoom, it’s nice to be back together in person.

… This year’s schedule is here. This page lists the participants and includes links to some of their work. As he does every year, Ross Anderson is liveblogging the talks.

Here are my posts on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth SHB workshops. Follow those links to find summaries, papers, and occasionally audio/video recordings of the various workshops. Ross also maintains a good webpage of psychology and security resources.

It’s a mental illness and we tend to ignore or avoid anything to do with mental illness.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/27/stopping-mass-shooters-q-a-00035762

Two Professors Found What Creates a Mass Shooter. Will Politicians Pay Attention?

… Three years ago, Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology at Hamline University, and James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University, decided to take a different approach. In their view, the failure to gain a more meaningful and evidence-based understanding of why mass shooters do what they do seemed a lost opportunity to stop the next one from happening. Funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, their research constructed a database of every mass shooter since 1966 who shot and killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces and places of worship since 1999.

… Their findings, also published in the 2021 book, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, reveal striking commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings and suggest a data-backed, mental health-based approach could identify and address the next mass shooter before he pulls the trigger — if only politicians are willing to actually engage in finding and funding targeted solutions.

… mass shootings are socially contagious and when one really big one happens and gets a lot of media attention, we tend to see others follow.

… There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward. There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety.

Caffeine up! (So why aren’t the British extinct?)

https://neurosciencenews.com/coffee-mortality-20705/

Sweetened and Unsweetened Coffee Consumption Associated With Lower Death Risk

Summary: Those who drink sweetened coffee daily are up to 31% less likely to die within a 7-year follow-up than non-coffee drinkers. Those who drank unsweetened coffee were 21% less likely to die during the follow-up.

A useful metaphor? Years of progress lost.

https://www.databreaches.net/ransomware-attack-sends-new-jersey-county-back-to-1977/

Ransomware attack sends New Jersey county back to 1977

Brandon Vigliarolo reports:

Somerset County, New Jersey, was hit by a ransomware attack this week that hobbled its ability to conduct business, and also cut off access to essential data.

“Services that depend on access to county databases are temporarily unavailable, such as land records, vital statistics, and probate records. Title searches are possible only on paper records dated before 1977,” the county said in a statement.

Read more at The Register.

As the percentage of self-driving cars increases, the probability that two will collide also increases. A case of AI vs. AI!

https://thenextweb.com/news/self-driving-cars-crash-responsible-courts-black-box

When self-driving cars crash, who’s responsible? Courts need to know what’s inside the ‘black box’

The first serious accident involving a self-driving car in Australia occurred in March this year. A pedestrian suffered life-threatening injuries when hit by a Tesla Model 3, which the driver claims was in “autopilot” mode.

In the US, the highway safety regulator is investigating a series of accidents where Teslas on autopilot crashed into first-responder vehicles with flashing lights during traffic stops.

The decision-making processes of “self-driving” cars are often opaque and unpredictable (even to their manufacturers), so it can be hard to determine who should be held accountable for incidents such as these. However, the growing field of “explainable AI” may help provide some answers.

Is the problem Russia’s military strategy or Putin’s leadership?

https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-russias-air-war-ukraine-total-failure-new-data-show-1709388

Exclusive: Russia's Air War in Ukraine is a Total Failure, New Data Show

… Russia's dubious world record in accumulating missile strikes comes as President Zelensky announced that his country destroyed their 200th Russian airplane, an embarrassing result for an air force that is 15 times larger than that of Ukraine.

The global commentary on this milestone lauded Ukraine's defenders while noting Russia's failure to take advantage of its overwhelming numerical advantage, Moscow's misstep in not establishing air superiority in the skies over Ukraine, and Russia's dwindling supply of precision-guided weapons.

In the face of all of this, Russia retaliated on Sunday by announcing that it had destroyed 165 Ukrainian aircraft since the beginning of its "special military operation." That would be almost three times the number of flyable fighter jets that Ukraine even possesses.

… Russia's failure to follow this path has become a significant feature of the Ukraine war—one that confuses Western observers. [Certainly confused me! Bob] After 48 hours of attacks on Ukrainian air defenses in the opening salvo of the war, Moscow seemed to give up on pursuing this American war prerequisite. The Russians attacked airfields and air defense sites on the first two days but mostly didn't follow-up. Ukraine's small air force was largely grounded, but Kyiv was given an opportunity to adjust, especially in its dispersal of air defense missiles, in particular shoulder-fired ones. This created what Stringer calls "poor man's air superiority."

This could be extremely important (and valuable) since programmers hate to document and when they do, they do it poorly.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/30/mintlify-taps-ai-to-automatically-generate-documentation-from-code/

Mintlify taps AI to automatically generate documentation from code

Mintlify, a startup developing software to automate software documentation tasks…

… “We’ve worked as software engineers at companies in all stages ranging from startups to big tech and found that they all suffer from bad documentation, if it even existed at all,” Wang told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Documentation is the lifeline for junior engineers and those jumping into new codebases. It helps senior devs save time from explaining their code to others in the future. For public-facing and open-source products, documentation has a direct impact on user adoption.”

 Data as the new oil?  

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4116921

A Perspective on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence

Data is the weapon of the future.  Whoever controls data, controls the world… If we don’t put up a fight, our data will belong to the wrong people – The Billion Dollar Code Machine Learning Algorithms: An Overview

Best to keep your AI happy…

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4115647

Both/And - Why Robots Should not Be Slaves

One solution to the exclusive person/thing dichotomy that persists in both moral philosophy and law is slavery.  Already in Roman times, slaves were regarded as something more than a mere thing but not quite a full person.  They occupied a liminal position that was situated in between the one and the other, being both thing and person.  And there has been, in both the legal and philosophical literature, a surprising number of serious proposals arguing for instituting what can only be called Slavery 2.0.  This chapter provides a thorough critique of these “robots should be slaves” proposals, demonstrating how this supposed solution to the person/thing dichotomy actually produces more and significantly worse problems than it can possibly begin to resolve. 

Can machines be ethical? 

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Fatih-Esen/publication/360655432_The_Trust_in_the_Usage_of_Artificial_Intelligence_in_Social_Media_and_Traditional_Mass_Media/links/6283cb7eb2548471fee261d2/The-Trust-in-the-Usage-of-Artificial-Intelligence-in-Social-Media-and-Traditional-Mass-Media.pdf#page=76 

DIMENSIONS AND LIMITATIONS OF AI ETHICS

Ethics of AI is a new field in philosophy of technology addressing ethical issues raised by various emerging technologies under the umbrella term of “artificial intelligence” (AI).  The notion of “artificial intelligence” broadly understood is any kind of artificial (semi)autonomous system that shows forms of intelligent behaviour in achieving a goal.  Initially, intelligent behaviour in machines had to simulate human cognitive faculties, such as symbolic manipulation, logical reasoning, abstract thinking, learning, decision-making, and more (McCarthy et al. 1955: 2), but current understanding of AI incorporates wider range of automatic artificial agents, which excel at particular narrowly defined tasks. 

…   Traditionally, moral behaviour required rational determination of the will (Kant 2015), so only human beings were expected to bear moral responsibility and rights.  From this perspective, technologies have been understood as passive and neutral instruments, whose use by humans could be ethical or unethical. 

You have got to be kidding.  Who defines the moral?  

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190881931.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190881931-e-53

Moral Bioenhancement and Future Generations: Selecting Martyrdom?

Moral bioenhancement is a biological modification or intervention which makes moral behavior more likely.  There are a number of ways this could potentially be achieved, including pharmaceuticals, non-invasive brain stimulation, or genetic engineering.  Moral bioenhancement can be distinguished from other kinds of enhancement because it primarily benefits others, rather than just the individual who has been enhanced.  With the challenges that will face future generations, such as climate change and the rise of artificial intelligence, it is even more important to address the possibilities of moral bioenhancement.  In this chapter, the authors examine rationales for moral bioenhancement, the possibilities of these technologies, and some common critiques and concerns.  The authors defend the view that moral bioenhancement may be a useful tool—one tool among many—to help future generations respond to these aforementioned challenges.  The authors suggest that an application of the non-identity problem to genetic selection may help resolve some of the concerns surrounding moral bioenhancement.

Your face is out there! Apparently as easy to find as your street address. How is this better or worse than Clearview?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/this-facial-recognition-site-is-creeping-everyone-out

This Facial Recognition Site Is Creeping Everyone Out

A facial recognition tool called PimEyes has recently gone from unknown to infamous.

PimEyes makes it easy to find pictures of people that are strewn across the internet. That isn't necessarily surprising—reverse image searches have been a thing for years—but it turns out PimEyes is astoundingly good at identifying people with naught but a single photograph.

The New York Times reports that it found years-old pictures even if the sample image featured people wearing sunglasses or face masks. Other factors such as different facial hair, new hair styles, or the passage of time didn't seem to make all that much of a difference either.

… PimEyes has responded to the resulting scrutiny with a blog post in which it says:

PimEyes just provides a tool, and the user is obliged to use the tool with responsibility. Everyone can buy a hammer, and everyone can either craft with this tool, or kill. It is impossible to check if certain individuals use every tool in their possession in accordance with the law and it is unwise to oblige toolmakers to ensure that their product will be used as they are intended to be used. If PimEyes starts to verify every user and compare it to the data searched by the user, this might turn the company into a monster that stores not only the personal, biometric data of each subscriber, but the materials that in the most of cases they would like to leave confidential. Therefore, it is crucially important for company to have opened communication policy, cooperate with media and various information platforms to encourage ethical usage of service and internet.

Students are just statistics…

https://www.pogowasright.org/schools-urge-end-to-forced-disclosure-of-private-student-information-state-using-data-to-track-vaccinations/

Schools urge end to forced disclosure of private student information; state using data to track vaccinations

Sherrie Peif reports:

More than 20 charter schools across the state recently presented a petition to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) requesting that it stop collecting and using private information of school children to publicize youth vaccination rates on its website.

Diana Herrero, deputy director of the division of disease control and public health response — a division of CDPHE — confirmed in an email obtained by Complete Colorado that it has been collecting identifying information about Colorado school children without their parents’ knowledge to combine with its COVID-19 vaccination records and create a public database that showcases the vaccination rates at every school in Colorado.

Read more at Complete Colorado.

Also good information if hacking is your side hustle…

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-start-career-in-ethical-hacking/

How to Make a Career Out of Ethical Hacking

To catch a criminal, you must think like one by understanding the tactics and patterns of the criminal.

Ethical hackers are the opposite of cybercriminals. As an ethical hacker, you'll be working around the clock to nullify the efforts of the bad buys trying to breach computer networks.

So, what skills do you need to become an ethical hacker? Where can you learn ethical hacking? And what are the entry-level jobs for ethical hacking? You are about to find out.

My AI suggests Ireland should have found an AI for that post.

https://analyticsindiamag.com/ireland-gets-its-first-ai-ambassador-will-other-countries-follow-suit/

Ireland gets its first AI ambassador. Will other countries follow suit?

Ireland has appointed Dr Patricia Scanlon as its first AI Ambassador to facilitate the Government’s AI adoption strategy launched last year.

… She will work on demystifying AI and promoting the positive impacts it can have in areas such as transport, agriculture, health and education.

Perspective.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/ukraine-russia-moskva-military-marine-corps/629930/

A Whole Age of Warfare Sank With the Moskva

… On April 14, 2022, the Ukrainians sank the Russian cruiser Moskva with a pair of Neptune anti-ship missiles. And that success posed an urgent question to the world’s major militaries: Has another age of warfare just begun? After 20 years spent fighting the post-9/11 wars, the United States military’s attention is again focused on a peer-level adversary. The Pentagon hasn’t been thinking this way since the Cold War, and it is attempting a profound transformation. Today, fierce debate attends this transformation, and nowhere more acutely than in the Marine Corps.

In March 2020, the Marine commandant, General David Berger, published “Force Design 2030.” This controversial paper announced a significant restructuring based on the belief that “the Marine Corps is not organized, trained, equipped or postured to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving future operating environment.” That “future operating environment” is an imagined war with China in the South Pacific—but in many ways, that hypothetical conflict resembles the real war in Ukraine.

The military we have—an army built around tanks, a navy built around ships, and an air force built around planes, all of which are technologically advanced and astronomically expensive—is platform-centric. So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune.

Berger believes a new age of war is upon us. In “Force Design 2030,” he puts the following sentence in bold: “We must acknowledge the impacts of proliferated precision long-range fires, mines, and other smart weapons, and seek innovative ways to overcome these threat capabilities.”

Perspective.

https://thenextweb.com/news/halseys-record-label-wont-release-a-new-song-until-it-goes-viral-on-tiktok-is-this-the-future-of-the-music-industry

Halsey’s record label won’t release a new song until it goes viral on TikTok. Is this the future of the music industry?

On Sunday, popular American singer songwriter Halsey shared a video on TikTok with tinny music in the background, the on-screen text reading:

Basically I have a song that I love that I wanna release ASAP but my record label won’t let me. I’ve been in this industry for 8 years and I’ve sold over 165 million records. And my record company is saying that I can’t release it unless they can fake a viral moment on TikTok. Everything is marketing. And they are doing this to basically every artist these days. I just wanna release music, man. And I deserve better tbh. I’m tired.

I dismissed this initially, thinking that no one would think the metaverse was real. Then I thought of all the people who think Trump’s version of a stolen election is real…

https://thenextweb.com/news/uae-ai-minister-wants-murder-metaverse-real-crime

The UAE’s AI minister wants ‘murder’ in the metaverse to be a real crime

Omar Sultan Al Olama, the United Arab Emirates minister of artificial intelligence, yesterday told an audience at the World Economic forum in Davos that it’s his belief that people who commit “serious crimes” in the metaverse should be punished with real-world criminal consequences.

Per an article by CNBC’s Sam Shead, the minister views this as a necessary measure to protect people’s mental health:

If I send you a text on WhatsApp, it’s text right? It might terrorize you but to a certain degree it will not create the memories that you will have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from it.

But if I come into the metaverse and it’s a realistic world that we’re talking about in the future and I actually murder you, and you see it … it actually takes you to a certain extreme where you need to enforce aggressively across the world because everyone agrees that certain things are unacceptable.

Unintended consequence, but something to keep in mind going forward!

https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/nsa-sanctions-on-russia-having-a-positive-effect-on-ransomware-attacks-attempts-down-due-to-difficulty-collecting-ransom-payments/

NSA: Sanctions on Russia Having a Positive Effect on Ransomware Attacks, Attempts Down Due to Difficulty Collecting Ransom Payments

An automated navy?

https://seapowermagazine.org/us-5th-fleet-commander-explains-role-of-unmanned-ai-in-middle-east/

US 5th Fleet Commander Explains Role of Unmanned, AI in Middle East

The commander for U.S. naval forces in the Middle East discussed the role of unmanned systems and artificial intelligence in naval operations at an international security conference in the United Kingdom, May 24, NAVCENT Public Affairs said May 25.

Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, U.S. 5th Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces, spoke to an audience of nearly 800 international defense and industry leaders during the Combined Naval Event at the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre.

“We are on a path to build the world’s first international unmanned surface vessel fleet,” Cooper said. “Three weeks ago, we surpassed 10,000 total sailing hours for unmanned surface vessels throughout the region. Additionally, two vessels each exceeded 100 consecutive operating days at sea.”

War makes all logistics a target. How long would you continue fighting if you could not feed your children, let alone your army.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3661434/remote-bricking-of-ukrainian-tractors-raises-agriculture-security-concerns.html#tk.rss_all

Remote bricking of Ukrainian tractors raises agriculture security concerns

Modern agriculture depends on internet-connected machinery that is centrally controlled and collects and analyzes massive amounts of data, making it an inviting target for threat actors.

Against the backdrop of horrific reports from Russia's Ukraine invasion, an encouraging story emerged earlier this month when unidentified Ukrainians remotely disabled tractors worth $5 million that Russian soldiers in the occupied city of Melitopol stole from Agrotek-Invest, an authorized John Deere dealer. The soldiers stole 27 pieces of farm machinery and shipped them primarily to Chechnya, 700 miles away, only to discover they had been rendered inoperable due to a "kill switch."

The dealership tracked the machinery using the tractors' embedded GPS technology. Although the equipment was reportedly languishing at a farm near Grozny on May 1, one source said the Russians had found consultants who would try to bypass the digital protection that bricked the machines.

Some observers fear that malicious actors could exploit the same technology Deere and other manufacturers use to update and monitor farm equipment. If successfully accomplished on a large-enough scale, a cyberattack could disrupt significant portions of what has become critical agricultural infrastructure.

Imagine a school district that “monitored” their students (and faculty, parents, and others?) perhaps once a week. Did they have a flawless AI algorithm? What did they promise parents this system would do?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10853241/Uvalde-school-district-monitoring-students-social-media-pages-threats-against-staff-site.html

REVEALED: Uvalde school district was part of AI program that rooted out potential mass killers and monitored social media for threats and potential shooters

Texas school officials had been monitoring students' social media prior to the deadly shooting in Uvalde Tuesday, it has been revealed - but still failed to pick up on concerning posts from the teenage gunman in the days leading up to the tragedy.

… Now, Uvalde School officials say they had been monitoring its students' social media pages using an advanced AI-based service called Social Sentinel, designed to recognize signals of potential harm found in digital conversations.

The district revealed Monday it had been using the platform 'to monitor all social media with a connection to Uvalde as a measure to identify any possible threats that might be made against students and or staff within the school district.'

… However, in this particular instance, the technology fell short - failing to spot Ramos' objectively concerning posts and notify district officials.

It is not immediately clear why the technology failed to flag Ramos' posts. DailyMail.com reached out to Social Sentinel and Uvalde district staffers for comment on the software's apparent failure Wednesday morning, but did not immediately hear back.

If consent is what you want, consent is what we’ll give you. (Will they copy images from the ‘consent’ database to the bigger database?)

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220525005378/en/Clearview-AI-Launches-Clearview-Consent-Company%E2%80%99s-First-Consent-Based-Product-for-Commercial-Uses

Clearview AI Launches Clearview Consent; Company’s First Consent Based Product for Commercial Uses

For the first time, Clearview AI’s industry leading FRT algorithm will be available for a multitude of identity verification purposes across the commercial marketplace. Product will be offered separate and apart from Clearview AI’s database of facial images

… Clearview Consent will offer Clearview AI’s state-of-the-art, world renowned, highly accurate and bias-free facial recognition technology (FRT) to companies for use in consent-based enterprise workflows. It will be sold as a licensed product, separate and apart from the company’s database of 20+ billion facial images, the largest such database in the world. This means private companies will be able to use Clearview AI’s industry leading FRT platform, powered by the most accurate and bias-free algorithm in the U.S. and Western World.

(Related) Nothing if not opportunistic.

https://gizmodo.com/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-privacy-1848975528

Clearview AI Says It's Bringing Facial Recognition to Schools

The company revealed it's working with a U.S. company selling visitor management systems to schools within hours of a horrific school shooting.

… In a press release Wednesday, the company outlined a path toward an apparent one-to-one face match verification method that could be used in schools, banks, and other private firms as part of its new “Clearview Consent” product. Clearview says it seeks to sell its facial recognition tool to enterprise companies decoupled from its massive database of faces. Theoretically, that means private companies could use Clearview’s system as a 1:1 identity verification tool before creating an online account, check-in a passenger at an airport, or protecting against financial fraud.

… Clearview’s pivot towards a database-free version of its tech comes partly out of necessity. The walls have started to close in around the country in recent months, with new restrictions and government opposition threatening to upend their core product offerings.

Today the intelligence services, tomorrow the world...

https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/swiss-government-proposes-backdoor-in-its-banking-secrecy-laws-for-spy-agency-pressure-applied-by-un-over-human-rights-concerns/

Swiss Government Proposes Backdoor in Its Banking Secrecy Laws for Spy Agency; Pressure Applied by UN Over Human Rights Concerns

The private Swiss bank account has been one of the country’s distinguishing features for nearly 100 years. But these banking secrecy laws began to see significant erosion in 2018, and are facing another substantial blow as the country’s government is proposing to allow its spy agency to monitor financial transactions.

This comes amidst debate about doing away with the country’s famous banking secrecy laws entirely, as the United Nations applies pressure in the wake of the Credit Suisse scandal.